Tyler Perry’s Straw: A Tragedy of Misjudged Sympathy

So, I got to see the anticipated and most talked-about movie recently on the net, and there is this expectation of greatness that you bring along with you while watching the movie. If I must be honest, my expectations got deeply bruised. I suddenly didn't understand the reason for the fuss. So let me just tell a little about the movie.

Synopsis

The movie starts with a single mom, Janiyah Wilkinson, who works at a mall but has a strict boss. At the start of the movie, she bathes and dresses her daughter up for school and takes her to school, all while interacting with the daughter. She then swings to work, where she was already late, and just a few minutes later, she had to leave work to rush to her daughter’s school where she said she was needed. On getting to the school, the government care agency has taken her child into custody. This frustrates her day the more, and on her way back to work, she is being threatened by a police officer and issued a ticket by another.

This time, when she gets to work, the boss is fed up with her continuous excuses and fires her. She demands her paycheck, which is supposed to get to her that day, probably by noon, but the boss starts to tell her about company policy and how she was going to receive it by mail. She learns that she has been kicked out of her apartment, and so she gets to the boss’s office again demanding her salary, but this time, armed robbers attack the boss. As an aggrieved mother and personality, she is not moved by the robbers, and somehow she gets hold of their gun and shoots the robber and her boss as well. She takes her cheque, which was ready for her but withheld by her boss, and goes to the bank down the street where she usually cashes her cheque.

Because she forgot to drop the gun, the bank manager thinks she came to rob the bank and calls the cops. Along the line, FBI swing into the case, and she gave up to being arrested only when she understood that she was not going to be shot by the police and that her baby, whom she did all these for, had just died the previous night. She was later taken into custody by the police.

My View On The Storyline

So while browsing online, I've heard a lot of people sympathize with Janiyah, the aggrieved mother, and I don't even understand why. It's good to sympathize with her as a mother who lost her baby, but the person whom I would sympathize with is the family of her boss, Richard. Truth is that he wasn't the best of a boss to her, as the movie could allow us to see, but you know what? I didn't expect him to even allow her go to her daughter's school, but the boss still gave her 30 minutes. That’s generous considering the said employee, Janiyah, would have always been leaving work on emergency situations like this. The manager was just fed up (he is not running a charity) and had to let her go.

Now, I believe he wasn't the best of boss to her (but she wasn't the only employee either), but he still followed the books anyway. Now I don't know how things operate in the USA or whether he should have given her her already earned cheque, but I believe the mailing policy was also valid for a terminated staff.

The boss was a victim of a mentally unstable single mother who lived in denial of the truth. Remember she had already started living in denial the moment she woke up and not when she arrived at work.

As for Janiyah the single mother, so many people might think she will go to jail for killing people, but one beautiful but sad thing about the law is that the first people the protected by criminal law of any country is not women and children but mentally unstable persons (that is why during a criminal case hearing, the defendant/accused could use the insanity plea). She has so many alibi to prove that she was mentally unstable, so after a rehabilitation process, she will still walk free while her boss remains unalive. I feel like the public really need to know the fate of Janiyah, and so I believe the movie is somewhat incomplete.

The twist I expected was that the policeman kills her, then her fear comes to play out, and then her insanity is revealed as well. Could have been a very disturbing one, but she came out victorious and will continue to walk free.

I didn't really see the twist I expected from the movie. In fact, I didn't even see any twist in the movie. In my opinion, Tyler Perry's Duplicity has better twist than this Straw. After having seen the movie and all, I'm going to give it a rating of 7.5 / 10.